Mixing neutral colors

Neutral colors play a very important role in painting, the give our more saturated colors meaning and a bit of room to breathe.

If you create a sketch with only the intense, candy-colored saturated versions of colors, you’ll quickly overwhelm the sketch, and your viewer. Neutrals colors can help with that. A lot of the subtle beauty in nature can be shown or brought out with these more neutral, subdued colors.

These colors often appear gray or desaturated, but they can also take on a slight warm or cool tinge – just as the colors around them. Subtle grays, browns, ochres, greens – all of these can enhance each other.

Neutrals can often be found in the muddy parts of our palette, or they can be created by mixing opposites – opposites of what exactly? There are a lot of ways to chart and organize colors to show their relationships, one of them is the color wheel. If we organize our saturated colors in a color wheel, we have a practical tool to see what combinations are possible to create neutrals – it’s roughly the opposites, or complimentary colors. Pigments or colors opposite each other create a neutral color when mixed. I say roughly because it can always differ a bit because we’re using actual physical pigments for mixing, not rays of light in ideal conditions.

When you’re mixing neutrals (or any two colors), you can choose to create a smooth mix, or let the individual pigments show through a bit by leaving them unmixed, or drop in slightly more paint or water – this will create interesting variety just as you can see in nature.

It’s often a better decision to mix neutrals yourself, particularly for field-sketching. When it comes to detailed renderings of black or gray animals or pants (think corvids, black insects or black berries), the premixed colors have their place. As a rule of thumb, I try to stick with a gray/black pigment when the local (actual) color of the object is also gray/black and I don’t gain anything from adding subtle changes in color, or when showing light effects doesn’t make sense. This is often the case for more neutral, scientific sketches or a black animal – though some of these have iridescent colors. For landscapes or any kind of loose sketches, it almost never makes sense to use pre-mixed black except for dark accents. So rather create interesting neutrals from your complementaries than mixing your bright colors with black or gray.

Complimentary color pairs are red and green, blue and orange, yellow and violet. Mixing those complimentary colors can give you a broad range of neutrals – it’s worth to give these color pairs on your palette a try. If you start by mixing in just a little of the opposite and see how your mix changes. You’ll get a range of neutral colors that way. I recently explored this with some new pigments I experimented with.

So try mixing reds and greens, oranges (also earth colors) and blues, and yellows (light earth colors) and purple and see what happens. Also try less obvious mixes, like pink/red and turquoise, red earth tones and blues, or greens and violets. Pigments have different physical properties and will combine (and sometimes separate again) in interesting mixtures, and they don’t always follow the simple rule of combining opposites on the color wheel – sometimes those combinations bend and flex the wheel a bit. But it’s a good tool for orientation.

Very transparent pigments with a high vibrancy (also described as chroma) will get you strong dark grays, whereas less saturated colors will often produce lovely subdued mixes. You can learn a lot about your pigments by doing mixing experiments. Take plenty of notes!

A great place to start is the classic combination of burnt sienna and ultramarine blue (or any other blue) to create a gray, or a subdued blue, or a subdued brown – all depending on the pigment ratio.

Another good trick is to add a tiny bit of red, or red earth, into your greens if you find them to saturated and bright. The red will neutralize the color just a bit and take away some of the vibrancy and candy-color aspect. You don’t have to dull down your greens everywhere, but I find it can help to have a good mix of very vibrant and less saturated areas of color.

I’ve recently explored all my pigments and tried new and different combinations with the goal to create interesting neutrals. Don’t be overwhelmed, I have a lot of pigments – I don’t use all of those on a daily basis. Just start with what you have available and go from there.

I usually note the pigment numbers rather than the names of the colors (with a few exceptions like sap green) to make these easier to understand and recreate.

If you haven’t looked into pigment names and why they’re preferable to paint names from manufacturers, this post will give you a good introduction:
An introduction to watercolor pigments – things you need to know about colors and pigments

The same pigments can also vary a bit between brands, but this should be a good starting point.

For a more general introduction to color mixing and terms, this post is helpful:
The properties of color + how to mix colors

List of pigments I used and their names:

PY110 Isoindolinone Yellow
PY43 Yellow Ochre
PBr7 Raw Umber, Burnt Umber
PR101 Burnt Sienna
PBr25 (Benz)Imidazolone Brown
PR254 Pyrrole Red
PR209 Quinacridone Red
PV19 Quinacridone Rose
PR179 Perylene Maroon
PR122 Quinacridone Magenta
PV14 Cobalt Violet
PV15 Ultramarine Violet
PV23 Dioxazine Violet

PB27 Prussian Blue
PB28 Cobalt Blue
PB29 Ultramarine Blue
PB35 Cerulean Blue
PB36 Cerulean Blue GS
PB60 Indanthrone Blue
PG50 Cobalt Green
PG7 Phthalo Green BS
PG18 Viridian
PG36 Phthalo Green YS
PG17 Chromium Oxide Green

Here are the results:

I often find myself drawn to the bright, candy-like variety of color itself (who can resist a vibrant primary palette?), but then I often find the neutrals that I mix from these intense colors equally useful in my sketches. Those neutrals can be a framework that brings out your intense saturated colors and gives them meaning. That doesn’t mean you should paint everything in neutrals and muddy colors, but the combination of these makes a sketch interesting.

Of course there are scenes that are just full of intense candy colors, but I find those almost always need a bit of a buffer with more neutral, muted colors. Take a look at what the impressionists did with color – they loved saturated colors and chose bright pigments to be able to recreate light effects on the canvas, but they also combined them with desaturated, more neutral colors in a very effective way to make the intense color stand out more.

I hope my mixing experiments can give you some useful ideas to create your own neutrals, and also showed you why it’s important to think about these muted colors in the first place. Let me know your favorite mix to create neutrals in the comments!